In 2001, my sophomore year of college, I took a Women in Anthropology class. It was one of my favorite courses, though it wasn’t until recently that I retrieved an interview I had conducted with my mom from a 3.5 diskette. You know the one…or maybe you don’t.
In any event, in tribute to what would have been her 74th birthday, I share this interview.
Georgeta Gronov (later known as Gigi) was born in Romania on May 18, 1946 to George and Elena Gronov. The following interview was conducted in Winnetka, CA on November 1, 2001.
Q. Where did you go when you left communist Romania? Why?
A. I went to Czechoslovakia, but that wasn’t where I had planned to go. See, every citizen is allowed to have a passport. I had one to visit Yugoslavia, and Holland, yet after a month of receiving my passport, the Romanian police took it away. I made an appointment with immigration officials to get it back. I told them that every citizen of Romania has the right to have a passport. The officials told me that was true, but they also had the right to take it away, or give it to me.
This made me very mad, and for six months the police followed me because they thought that I would run away. However, by mistake I was put on a list to go on a tour in Czechoslovakia with some traveling doctors. I went, and once there, I made the decision to cross the open boarder into Austria. On October 13, 1969 at 8 o’clock PM, I crossed the border into Austria from Czechoslovakia. Four hours later, at midnight, the Russians closed the border.
I went to Austria because it was an open country where you could fill out immigration papers, to visit other countries. My initial plan was to go to Holland and visit my aunt. I wrote to her, and told her that I would be coming for a visit. However, in her response she wrote, “Dogs do not walk with pretzels on their tails over here.” In other words, you can come but I won’t support you. I wouldn’t have expected that she would support me so I decided to stay in Austria.
Q. Where did you go in Austria? Who did you stay with?
A. I went to Vienna where I knew some Romanian friends. That year snowed more than it had in seventy years and I didn’t have any closed heeled shoes!
A lot of Romanians had immigrated to Vienna but it was a German woman offered me a room in her home without having to pay. She only spoke German, so there was very little communication between us since I knew only a little bit of German from my father.
Q. Did you hear from your aunt again?
A. A cousin of mine came to visit, and she had a package from my aunt. I figured that the package would contain clothing, and maybe other basic necessities. I opened the package after my cousin left the train station. Inside was a radio, and a block of cheese. I couldn’t believe my eyes. She knew that my luggage was sent back to Romania, and that all I had were the clothes on my back along with an extra pair of panties. I went back to my living quarters. The German women asked if I met with my cousin, and I started crying. I told her what happened, and even though we did not communicate very well, she said, “It’s ok, because now you are in my house and that makes you my daughter.” She bought me clothes to wear and took care of me.
Q. How long did you stay in Vienna?
A. I stayed in Vienna for seven months. From October to May.
Q. Did you work?
A. Yes, I worked in a factory called “Scharack” which produced electronic parts for the company that I worked for in Romania. I was now a factory worker, whereas in Romania I was an electrical draftsman. With this money I bought myself some more clothing.
Q. How often did you speak to your mom?
A. Once a month. I couldn’t speak to her, or the rest of my family often, and when I did it was brief because the phone was tapped in Romania. Letters that I wrote were opened before government officials delivered them to my family. If they helped me, they would be thrown in jail.
While working in Vienna, she received her visa and secured a sponsor, a close friend of her fathers, in the United States who agreed to provide food and shelter until she could fully support herself.
Q. What mode of transportation did you use to come to America? Did you make any stops?
A. I came to the states by plane on May 5, 1970. There was a two-hour stop in New York, but I didn’t have any time to look around because I was too busy getting onto the next plane headed to California.
Q. Why did you decide to come to California?
A. I came to California because there was no snow, and because this is where my sponsor lived.
Q. Where did he live?
A. In Los Angeles on Fairfax by the CBS channel two network.
Q. What was your first job?
A. My first job was cleaning a single room. I had never seen dust like this in my life. It was like a blanket that you could pick it up in one piece. I earned ten dollars for cleaning that room, and it was the last time that I would ever clean a room like that. I smelled like chlorine for at least two days after I had finished the job.
Q. What did you buy with those ten dollars?
A. I bought a sewing machine from a garage sale because I needed clothes. And although I never had sewn in my life, I bought it anyway. I went and bought material with a pattern in baby blue, and I made a pair of pants and a jacket.
Q. How did you know the right lengths?
A. I just took my time, and figured out how to sew it right. It took all night long to make one pair of pants.
Q. Now that you refused to clean houses, what did you do?
A. A friend of mine worked at the Balboa Bay Club, and she got me a job as a masseuse. I had never given a massage in my life. My first customer was a woman named Mrs. Moore. I remember this woman because the massage was nine dollars alone, and she tipped me five dollars! During my employment there I met John Wayne.
Q. How did you get to work?
A. Every day I woke up at five o’ clock and took a bus from Hollywood to downtown 7th St., and from there I walked to Los Angeles St., where I then took the Greyhound bus to Newport Beach, and arrived at work by nine o’clock. I worked there until five o’clock, and then my manager Ethel drove me to the Greyhound bus at 5:30. The bus took me back to Los Angeles St., where I walked to Spring and 7th to attend the California Dental School. I was in school from seven in the evening to about ten-thirty at night. I then took the local bus back to my home in Hollywood.
Q. Were you living with your sponsor?
A. No, I had my own apartment where I paid rent.
Q. When did you finish school?
A. I finished school in two years. But in the meantime, I began to work as a draftsman during the week, and on the weekends, I continued to work at the spa club. As an employee we received free meals. We were able to order anything on the menu.
Q. What was your favorite meal?
A. There wasn’t a menu, so you would ask the chefs to make you anything, and they would make it for you. I enjoyed steak the most because it was familiar to me, and because it was the easiest thing to pronounce. The first time I ate it, I had it with A1 sauce and hated it. It was served with mashed potatoes, and vegetables.
Q. What kind of markets did you shop in? Ethnic markets? American Markets? Both?
A. I shopped at Vons where for every five dollars spent you could get a fork, a knife, a spoon, and serving pieces. Eventually I formed the 12 place settings of silverware that we have now. I only bought New York steak, and when I came home, I broiled it, made mashed potatoes and spinach cream. I didn’t shop at ethnic markets because they were too expensive. I was making sixty dollars a week. $75 was for rent, $60 a month for school and any left-over money was used to buy material to make my clothes, food, and savings for a car.
Q. When did you get a job as a dental technician?
A. The economy wasn’t very good, I was laid off as a draftsman at eight o’clock one morning. I went to visit a friend who worked for Buttress and Associates as a dental technician and told her that I was let go earlier that morning. She spoke to her supervisor, and he hired me. An hour later I had a job as a dental technician earning two dollars an hour, forty hours, five days a week. I was also still going to school, and working at the spa club on the weekends. I finished school in 1973 earning a degree as a Dental Technician.
Q. Why did you want to be a dental technician?
A. The real question is what jobs were there that didn’t require you to speak fluent English? To attend dental technician school, you didn’t have to be fluent in English. You just had to learn how to work with your hands.
Q. How did you learn to read and speak English?
A. I took a class at Hollywood High School where I didn’t learn anything. The only thing that I remember from that class was when the teacher said, “Hot dog mmm.” I didn’t know what a hot dog was.
I learned English mostly through television, and by reading the National Enquirer, and STAR tabloids because they were easy to read. But mostly from TV. The show I watched was called “Highway Patrol.” When they said, “go” and they went then I understood the meaning of “go.”
Q. How did you learn how to write?
A. I learned to write when Hidy was in the second grade. I never really had to write. I knew how to fill out applications, but I never had to write letters, or stories, or essays. So, when she was learning to write, I learned to write too.
Q. When did you buy your first car?
A. In 1972 I bought a brand-new Ford Mustang. I didn’t have my driver license; I had only passed the written exam. I originally wanted to buy a Mercury Comet because it had thick shaggy carpet inside. I told the man that I had $1600 for a down payment, and that I would pay $70 dollars a month. He drew up the papers and posted $80 a month on the documents. He asked, what is an extra $10? I looked at him and told him that ten dollars was a lot to me. I got up and left. I then walked down the street to the Ford Dealer, and paid the $1600 down payment, and paid $72 a month. I got a better car, but not the shaggy carpet.
Q. Did you drive it home?
A. No because I had never driven a car in my life, I didn’t have a license or insurance. A friend of mine drove it home for me. People thought I was crazy for buying a car that I couldn’t even drive, especially family in Europe. My aunt thought that I was lying when I wrote to my mother that I bought a car. I had even sent a photo of me next to the car. Yet she still didn’t believe that the car was mine. She said that I could have taken a picture with anybody’s car. In 1973, when I graduated, she also didn’t believe it despite sending her a copy of my diploma.
Q. When did you finally get your license?
A. Well, because I didn’t have money to pay for lessons, I asked a friend to teach me. Every morning we drove to work on the empty streets. Two weeks later I got my driver’s license.
Q. Was there a specific social circle that supported you?
A. In 1973 I went to a Romanian Orthodox Church where I met many Romanian people. I felt comfortable here people because they were all Romanian and understood where I was coming from.
Q. What was the one thing that struck you as different?
A. The freedom. To be able to do anything that you wanted to do without having to ask the authorities was what made living here worth it.
Q. When did you meet dad?
A. We met in 1971 when I started working at the Dental Lab. He was a supervisor in another department. The first time we spoke to each other was when a friend and I were arguing about where Hungary was located. She called him over and asked him. I was right and she was wrong. We didn’t speak again until 1976 when he became the supervisor of our department. When my car was stolen, he offered to drive me to and from work.
Q. What happened next?
A. We were working late one night in the lab, and he said, “I love you, dammit.” And I said, “Are you crazy?” He said, “I love you; I want to marry you.”
This is essentially where the interview ended, but their story didn’t. While this assignment focused on my mother’s story, my parents shared their stories with us often and sometimes multiple times.
If I have one piece of advice to share, and your parents are still alive, ask them questions about their lives – even the hard ones as we never know when they may not be here to share them with us.